Transcendent triumph in return
No longer lit his brain;
Transcendence rayed the distant urn
Where slept the fallen twain.
A SIGN-SEEKER
I mark the months in liveries dank and dry,
The noontides many-shaped and hued;
I see the nightfall shades subtrude,
And hear the monotonous hours clang negligently by.
I view the evening bonfires of the sun
On hills where morning rains have hissed;
The eyeless countenance of the mist
Pallidly rising when the summer droughts are done.
I have seen the lightning-blade, the leaping star,
The cauldrons of the sea in storm,
Have felt the earthquake’s lifting arm,
And trodden where abysmal fires and snow-cones are.
I learn to prophesy the hid eclipse,
The coming of eccentric orbs;
To mete the dust the sky absorbs,
To weigh the sun, and fix the hour each planet dips.
I witness fellow earth-men surge and strive;
Assemblies meet, and throb, and part;
Death’s soothing finger, sorrow’s smart;
—All the vast various moils that mean a world alive.
But that I fain would wot of shuns my sense—
Those sights of which old prophets tell,
Those signs the general word so well,
Vouchsafed to their unheed, denied my long suspense.